Nine surgeries completed.I think if she has one more, she gets a free gift card or something.

The end of another long day, yet this might have been the fastest surgery every.As I mentioned previously, we handed her off to anesthesia around 1pm.After a couple of hours, we still had not received an update (usually they come every hour), so we asked the nurse to call to OR for news.The OR nurse called us back and said that they had just finished the MRI mapping piece of the procedure.It was after 3pm, and they had just started surgery.It looked like another late night was on the way.An hour later the phone rang and we were expecting another update on progress.Instead the nurse said that they were all done and we could head down to the lobby to meet with the surgeon.

We met with the doctor, and it turns out that the actual surgery part took “five minutes”.Basically, they reopened her stitches, removed the old catheter and replaced it with one that was longer. And, it was done all in the time it takes me to make a piece of toast.While the previous catheter was trimmed back to drain the third ventricle from the edge, this one was longer and pushed down into the area that was created to connect the third and fourth.They could tell that the catheter was draining as intended, so that was the end of the surgery.

So far, she looks a lot better than she did this morning, but not nearly as good as she did before this whole shebang started.She’s very hungry and alert, which is great, but her eyes still look a little out of alignment.They’ve already written orders for an MRI for tomorrow to check the ventricle sizes, so hopefully we will get good news then.For now, I’m hoping she can get some sleep (which of course also means I can get some sleep).